Karolina Sobecka's Immediacy
PHOTO: Pamela Gentile
Interactive artist Karolina Sobecka at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival
Essay by Akira Mizuta Lippit
Karolina Sobecka has created a series of interactive objects and events that reach beyond the technical dimensions they deploy; in fact whose very point appears to be to reach beyond the technical limits of each work and to forge a point of contact between the work and its viewer. Everything moves toward this ecstatic point between spectator and work, constituting between them a phantom interactivity. As much an examination of space as a series of movements through it, Sobecka’s interactivity seeks the point at which mediation becomes indistinguishable from immediacy. In Sniff, the surface of a storefront window provides the space for this encounter between a live spectator and spectral dog. From Sobecka’s website: “Sniff is an interactive projection in a storefront window. As the viewer walks by the projection, his movements are tracked by a custom computer vision system. A CG dog, rendered dynamically in a game engine, comes up and sniffs him, following him, reacting to his gestures and forming a relationship with him based on the history of interaction.” The brief history of an individual passerby’s interaction with the computer-generated animal is also premised on a deeper history of human-animal interactions, on a memory of life transposed into a second space of life, into another life, an immediate life between two beings that live in different worlds and as entirely separate forms of life. The storefront window provides the contact surface, a wall of points on which two worlds touch and, in this instance, smell each other.
Is this a wall that separates or brings together two worlds, two distinct forms of life, two orders of corporeality? A tissue or exoskeleton? Throughout the surfaces that constitute Sobecka’s projects, these ambiguous walls form an architectonic foundation. In Disruption, spectators react to full-body images of themselves formed of small colored units of light on a wall, producing a biofeedback loop that synchronizes the two worlds and lives into a mirrored immediacy. The disruption is what makes the intimacy possible. Each side reacts to the other, a phantasmal communication between oneself and another self, oneself somewhere else. The surface of Disruption, the disruptive wall is neither a membrane nor blockage in this work, but rather a simulacrum that allows two beings to converge in a shadow dance.
But to ask whether such walls join or sever spaces and ontologies is already the wrong approach because Sobecka’s walls are not themselves constituted as permanent units, but rather as forms of media, as themselves media elements that move dynamically within and across the work, alongside and outside it. They are spectral parergons. Wildlife demonstrates the mobility of Sobecka’s surfaces dramatically. An animated tiger projected from a moving car runs across the spaces that surround the car as it moves through the city. The speed of the tiger corresponds to that of the car, creating at once a relation between automobility and projection, automechanics and wildlife (animal mechanics), but also between disparate structures in space connected by the movements of the projected tiger. Even the mechanics are modulated: “The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor.” (An alternate version of Wildlife appears in Chase, in which iconic cartoon characters chase each other in automobile projection, generating “infantilized” caricatures of urban violence pressed directly onto those urban surfaces.)
Wildlife mobilizes every surface until the spaces between art and environment, technê and nature, but also between different dimensions of exteriority become a series of shifting lines framing a whole work that encompasses its inside and outside elements. The tiger is linked to the automobile through projection and synchronicity, the spectator to mobility and the projected image, and the entire horizon of projected space one to the other through the continuity of the tiger’s movement. The effect is a zigzag that renders every surface an extension of the media, even as it erases those media, replacing them with a haunting immediacy. And this spectral immediacy is everywhere in Sobecka’s work; it is in the virtual ocean of Forth. The ocean’s surfaces are extended in this work above and below, a flat ocean surface viewed horizontally in one location, from below in another. The ocean rendered as a series of undulating surfaces that have lost their superficiality and turned every surface into an immersion.
Such lost superficiality resurfaces in Narcissist, “an automated self-reflecting system that marvels at its own beauty and grieves at its inability to consume it. The viewers are invited to touch the water and play with reflections, revealing and disturbing layers of the story. Narcissist embodies and re-tells Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and Echo.” Narcissus is the classical figure that failed to recognize himself, or more precisely the image of himself as an image. That is, he was unable to distinguish between images and things in the world, in particular his own existence as embodied and represented. He is a perfect figure for the reflection of virtual bodies and the real-life images, and Sobecka’s animation of this fable performs the disappearance of images in general, and their metamorphosis into moving surfaces through which we experience ourselves. Narcissism here is the profound superficiality of a medium that disappears on contact and envelopes the spectator in the immediacy of self-absorption.
Marshall McLuhan understood in 1964 the precipice of immediacy that haunted the media and its extensions, what he calls “the Age of Anxiety.” In Understanding Media, McLuhan traces three thousand years of mechanical evolution to a present moment in which human beings have embraced the world anxiously, fusing their nervous systems with the totality of physical and psychical space in a global stranglehold. “We have,” he says, “extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace.” He calls this fusion of human and environment a village: “as electrically contracted, the world is no more than a village.” The nervous idiom of McLuhan’s claim precipitates his prediction of the next step beyond this anxious embrace, the transition from nervous bodies to the simulation of consciousness “when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of society,” a mode of interactivity not only between human beings and their environments, but between human beings and other human beings, between selves and others no longer distinguishable aside from this interactivity.
But in Sobecka’s universe of immediate encounter, McLuhan’s anxiety is replaced by her gesture of enthusiastic reach beyond one’s limits. If the world contracts (into a village) through the media extensions or prostheses that McLuhan describes, Sobecka’s bodies are formed in extension, in the encounter with the outside of oneself, with a self turned fundamentally outside. McLuhan’s anxiety emerges from the imminent dispersion of an over-extended self, from the desperate desire to retain one’s sense of coherence, or organization. The loss of oneself, of both ones and selves, experienced by McLuhan as panic, is in Sobecka’s work a form of gentle surrender. A form of yielding to the outside, to its embrace, but also an over-rendering of the world and its subjects until the lines between mediation and immediation or amediation are no longer operative.
The immediacy of address returns forcefully in another interactive storefront window projection, It’s You. It is an immediacy that turns and returns in an extension of the self. From Sobecka’s description of the work: “The installation is a rear projection on large storefront window. Human figures crowd around something that they obscure from the pedestrian’s view. When the pedestrian stands behind them, as if to look over their shoulders, they step aside to allow him a view onto what they’re looking at. The pedestrian can now see part of the unfolding scene, and he obscures the view for the other pedestrians; he’s become part of the crowd.” The absorption of the spectator into the spectacle continues beyond encounter and integration. Eventually, the spectator becomes the spectacle, turning the momentum of encounter back toward the viewer. “After the pedestrian has been in the interaction area for a period of time, the projected figures will turn their attention to him. The viewer becomes the performer. If he does something to entertain his viewers, the projected figures will react by clapping, applauding the performance and clarifying their role of audience.” The turning heads that feature prominently in It’s You, the second person address that names a subject of enunciation elsewhere dissolves the high mediation of the work into a fluid immediacy that names the spectator (you) as its subject. The extension of the subject is here rather an intension, an intense subjectivity that passes through the spectator, that returns the spectator to a subjectivity outside.
Throughout her work, Sobecka forges such encounters with a subjectivity displaced outside. These encounters reach into the spaces between beings and their environments, between beings and other beings, and between the elements that composes distinct selves. It is in every sense interactivity, an activity defined by the phantom immediacy of an interstice, an interface between points in the world. Such spaces between faces, true interfaces appear in All the Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures, in which spectators step before a mirror and, while seeing their own reflections, encounter an animal face that masks their own. “A different animal appears every time a person walks in front of the mirror. … The animal mimics the viewer’s facial expressions, interspersing them with its own independent ones. One feels compelled to in turn enact those animal expressions, lip licking and snarling, fully inhabiting the role, following while being followed.” Who masks whom in this work? And are the divides only between human and animal faces, organic and virtual bodies, live and mediated forms?
The perfection invoked in the work’s title appears to refer to hybrid creatures, to the synthetic creation of human and animal forms, but also to one in which the ideological, ethical, and narcissistic lines of mediation have been removed from the spaces of encounter. Perfect creatures are interactive creations. The excessive mediation, or hypermediacy normally assumed in highly interactive spaces--what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation”--is revealed instead to be an immediacy. Immediate space is not only that marked by the withdrawal of ontological mediations such as those that divide human from animal being, but one marked by urgency, by emergency; the emergence of entirely new possibilities of interaction.
What is imagined in Karolina Sobecka’s interactivity, in the proliferating life she generates through Flightphase, forms of life forged in the encounter between multiple possibilities of life, is a radical immediacy. Radical because this immediacy is essential and because this immediacy is what makes life as such possible. Beyond the remarkable expertise that emerges in Sobecka’s work as a sensuous technology (a technology of the senses, but also a technology that senses), is an essential immediacy that makes life feasible in the first instance as the intimacy of an encounter with all other life. And these other lives, all other life in the immediate spaces of Sobecka’s work, are you. It’s you, immediately.
Akira Mizuta Lippit
April 2012
Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes three books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), and a forthcoming book on contemporary avant-garde media, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world, and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.
His work appears widely in journals and anthologies, and has been translated into Croatian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. He is past recipient of the Fulbright-Hays and Japan Foundation awards. Lippit is the General Editor of the journal Discourse, and is active in the independent film community where he programs events, serves on festival juries, and interviews filmmakers. He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.
Karolina Sobecka has created a series of interactive objects and events that reach beyond the technical dimensions they deploy; in fact whose very point appears to be to reach beyond the technical limits of each work and to forge a point of contact between the work and its viewer. Everything moves toward this ecstatic point between spectator and work, constituting between them a phantom interactivity. As much an examination of space as a series of movements through it, Sobecka’s interactivity seeks the point at which mediation becomes indistinguishable from immediacy. In Sniff, the surface of a storefront window provides the space for this encounter between a live spectator and spectral dog. From Sobecka’s website: “Sniff is an interactive projection in a storefront window. As the viewer walks by the projection, his movements are tracked by a custom computer vision system. A CG dog, rendered dynamically in a game engine, comes up and sniffs him, following him, reacting to his gestures and forming a relationship with him based on the history of interaction.” The brief history of an individual passerby’s interaction with the computer-generated animal is also premised on a deeper history of human-animal interactions, on a memory of life transposed into a second space of life, into another life, an immediate life between two beings that live in different worlds and as entirely separate forms of life. The storefront window provides the contact surface, a wall of points on which two worlds touch and, in this instance, smell each other.
Is this a wall that separates or brings together two worlds, two distinct forms of life, two orders of corporeality? A tissue or exoskeleton? Throughout the surfaces that constitute Sobecka’s projects, these ambiguous walls form an architectonic foundation. In Disruption, spectators react to full-body images of themselves formed of small colored units of light on a wall, producing a biofeedback loop that synchronizes the two worlds and lives into a mirrored immediacy. The disruption is what makes the intimacy possible. Each side reacts to the other, a phantasmal communication between oneself and another self, oneself somewhere else. The surface of Disruption, the disruptive wall is neither a membrane nor blockage in this work, but rather a simulacrum that allows two beings to converge in a shadow dance.
But to ask whether such walls join or sever spaces and ontologies is already the wrong approach because Sobecka’s walls are not themselves constituted as permanent units, but rather as forms of media, as themselves media elements that move dynamically within and across the work, alongside and outside it. They are spectral parergons. Wildlife demonstrates the mobility of Sobecka’s surfaces dramatically. An animated tiger projected from a moving car runs across the spaces that surround the car as it moves through the city. The speed of the tiger corresponds to that of the car, creating at once a relation between automobility and projection, automechanics and wildlife (animal mechanics), but also between disparate structures in space connected by the movements of the projected tiger. Even the mechanics are modulated: “The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor.” (An alternate version of Wildlife appears in Chase, in which iconic cartoon characters chase each other in automobile projection, generating “infantilized” caricatures of urban violence pressed directly onto those urban surfaces.)
Wildlife mobilizes every surface until the spaces between art and environment, technê and nature, but also between different dimensions of exteriority become a series of shifting lines framing a whole work that encompasses its inside and outside elements. The tiger is linked to the automobile through projection and synchronicity, the spectator to mobility and the projected image, and the entire horizon of projected space one to the other through the continuity of the tiger’s movement. The effect is a zigzag that renders every surface an extension of the media, even as it erases those media, replacing them with a haunting immediacy. And this spectral immediacy is everywhere in Sobecka’s work; it is in the virtual ocean of Forth. The ocean’s surfaces are extended in this work above and below, a flat ocean surface viewed horizontally in one location, from below in another. The ocean rendered as a series of undulating surfaces that have lost their superficiality and turned every surface into an immersion.
Such lost superficiality resurfaces in Narcissist, “an automated self-reflecting system that marvels at its own beauty and grieves at its inability to consume it. The viewers are invited to touch the water and play with reflections, revealing and disturbing layers of the story. Narcissist embodies and re-tells Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and Echo.” Narcissus is the classical figure that failed to recognize himself, or more precisely the image of himself as an image. That is, he was unable to distinguish between images and things in the world, in particular his own existence as embodied and represented. He is a perfect figure for the reflection of virtual bodies and the real-life images, and Sobecka’s animation of this fable performs the disappearance of images in general, and their metamorphosis into moving surfaces through which we experience ourselves. Narcissism here is the profound superficiality of a medium that disappears on contact and envelopes the spectator in the immediacy of self-absorption.
Marshall McLuhan understood in 1964 the precipice of immediacy that haunted the media and its extensions, what he calls “the Age of Anxiety.” In Understanding Media, McLuhan traces three thousand years of mechanical evolution to a present moment in which human beings have embraced the world anxiously, fusing their nervous systems with the totality of physical and psychical space in a global stranglehold. “We have,” he says, “extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace.” He calls this fusion of human and environment a village: “as electrically contracted, the world is no more than a village.” The nervous idiom of McLuhan’s claim precipitates his prediction of the next step beyond this anxious embrace, the transition from nervous bodies to the simulation of consciousness “when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of society,” a mode of interactivity not only between human beings and their environments, but between human beings and other human beings, between selves and others no longer distinguishable aside from this interactivity.
But in Sobecka’s universe of immediate encounter, McLuhan’s anxiety is replaced by her gesture of enthusiastic reach beyond one’s limits. If the world contracts (into a village) through the media extensions or prostheses that McLuhan describes, Sobecka’s bodies are formed in extension, in the encounter with the outside of oneself, with a self turned fundamentally outside. McLuhan’s anxiety emerges from the imminent dispersion of an over-extended self, from the desperate desire to retain one’s sense of coherence, or organization. The loss of oneself, of both ones and selves, experienced by McLuhan as panic, is in Sobecka’s work a form of gentle surrender. A form of yielding to the outside, to its embrace, but also an over-rendering of the world and its subjects until the lines between mediation and immediation or amediation are no longer operative.
The immediacy of address returns forcefully in another interactive storefront window projection, It’s You. It is an immediacy that turns and returns in an extension of the self. From Sobecka’s description of the work: “The installation is a rear projection on large storefront window. Human figures crowd around something that they obscure from the pedestrian’s view. When the pedestrian stands behind them, as if to look over their shoulders, they step aside to allow him a view onto what they’re looking at. The pedestrian can now see part of the unfolding scene, and he obscures the view for the other pedestrians; he’s become part of the crowd.” The absorption of the spectator into the spectacle continues beyond encounter and integration. Eventually, the spectator becomes the spectacle, turning the momentum of encounter back toward the viewer. “After the pedestrian has been in the interaction area for a period of time, the projected figures will turn their attention to him. The viewer becomes the performer. If he does something to entertain his viewers, the projected figures will react by clapping, applauding the performance and clarifying their role of audience.” The turning heads that feature prominently in It’s You, the second person address that names a subject of enunciation elsewhere dissolves the high mediation of the work into a fluid immediacy that names the spectator (you) as its subject. The extension of the subject is here rather an intension, an intense subjectivity that passes through the spectator, that returns the spectator to a subjectivity outside.
PHOTO: PAMELA GENTILE
Throughout her work, Sobecka forges such encounters with a subjectivity displaced outside. These encounters reach into the spaces between beings and their environments, between beings and other beings, and between the elements that composes distinct selves. It is in every sense interactivity, an activity defined by the phantom immediacy of an interstice, an interface between points in the world. Such spaces between faces, true interfaces appear in All the Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures, in which spectators step before a mirror and, while seeing their own reflections, encounter an animal face that masks their own. “A different animal appears every time a person walks in front of the mirror. … The animal mimics the viewer’s facial expressions, interspersing them with its own independent ones. One feels compelled to in turn enact those animal expressions, lip licking and snarling, fully inhabiting the role, following while being followed.” Who masks whom in this work? And are the divides only between human and animal faces, organic and virtual bodies, live and mediated forms?
The perfection invoked in the work’s title appears to refer to hybrid creatures, to the synthetic creation of human and animal forms, but also to one in which the ideological, ethical, and narcissistic lines of mediation have been removed from the spaces of encounter. Perfect creatures are interactive creations. The excessive mediation, or hypermediacy normally assumed in highly interactive spaces--what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation”--is revealed instead to be an immediacy. Immediate space is not only that marked by the withdrawal of ontological mediations such as those that divide human from animal being, but one marked by urgency, by emergency; the emergence of entirely new possibilities of interaction.
What is imagined in Karolina Sobecka’s interactivity, in the proliferating life she generates through Flightphase, forms of life forged in the encounter between multiple possibilities of life, is a radical immediacy. Radical because this immediacy is essential and because this immediacy is what makes life as such possible. Beyond the remarkable expertise that emerges in Sobecka’s work as a sensuous technology (a technology of the senses, but also a technology that senses), is an essential immediacy that makes life feasible in the first instance as the intimacy of an encounter with all other life. And these other lives, all other life in the immediate spaces of Sobecka’s work, are you. It’s you, immediately.
Akira Mizuta Lippit
April 2012
Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes three books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), and a forthcoming book on contemporary avant-garde media, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world, and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.
His work appears widely in journals and anthologies, and has been translated into Croatian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. He is past recipient of the Fulbright-Hays and Japan Foundation awards. Lippit is the General Editor of the journal Discourse, and is active in the independent film community where he programs events, serves on festival juries, and interviews filmmakers. He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.